The "Standard of Ur" from ancient Mesopotamia

About

Keep reading if
you want to know more about me as a person and as a writer.

Why I became a writer

Like many writers, I have always loved books. The happiest hours of my
childhood were spent with my nose burrowed deep in a book and my mind far away
in another place or time. My mother never allowed me to babysit. She believed
the house could burn down around me and I would be too absorbed in a book to
notice.

I knew early on that writing could be a career, and a fun one at that. My
late aunt Janet Louise Roberts (who also wrote as Louisa Bronte, Rebecca
Danton, and Janette Radcliffe) reveled in her career as a romance novelist.
Inspired by her, I started writing stories in elementary school. Sadly, those
early stories revealed no natural talent for plotting or story structure; the
animal hero, after a series of unconnected adventures, often came to an
unfortunate end such as being devoured by the villain.

Fast forward many years. I left Beavercreek, Ohio, to attend the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. From there I went to Evanston, Illinois, to earn master and doctorate degrees in anthropology, finishing just as Ronald Reagan’s efforts to undermine the American university system were having their most severe effects. With universities starved for money and faculty positions scarce, I needed another career. Because I had just written a dissertation, logical choices seemed editing, writing, or research.

By this time, I was married and living in Iowa, which offered few such jobs. We moved to Washington, D.C., where I worked first at Science magazine as editor of its Guide to Scientific Instruments and writer of its “New Products” column and later at The Journal of NIH Research as a half-time production person, half-time writer focusing on biotech instrumentation and techniques.

Health problems forced me to leave the traditional working world. People started
offering me freelance work, so I became a freelance science and medical writer
and copyeditor. I loved nearly everything about being a freelancer—the
solitude, the control over my schedule, the chorus of birds outside my office
windows, the fully stocked refrigerator and pantry a short walk away, and the
freedom to turn down boring assignments. During the 20+ years I was a
freelancer, I won several awards for medical writing.

When my husband took a job in New Orleans, I took that career along. We
lived in that beautiful, magical city from 1991 to 2007, except for three
months spent in Texas as refugees after Hurricane Katrina. We now live in
Southern California.

Through all those years, I still dreamed of writing fiction. But that dream
took a back seat to my career and hobbies. Many authors are driven to write.
I instead am driven to create. I knew from my aunt’s experience that I
could expect to put in years of hard work before I produced my first salable
book. How much easier it was to play music or design a quilt than to start such
a monumental project!

Then in 2000, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer and died six months
later. Before that, it seemed I had plenty of time to pursue dreams. But when
my mother died at age 70, despite having taken far better care of her health
than most people, I felt I had no time to waste. The time had come to stop
dreaming and start writing.

I joined both the Romance Writers of America (RWA) and its local New
Orleans chapter (SOLA), began squeezing in time between magazine articles to
write short stories, and joined a critique group.

Thanks to the tanking of the economy and consequent drying up of many
freelance jobs, I had the time in 2009 to attend the Clarion Science Fiction
and Fantasy Writers Workshop. It was a life-changing experience with amazing
teachers and classmates; my writing moved up to another level. Increasing
health problems made being a freelancer more and more difficult. In 2010, I
started shedding my remaining freelance jobs in favor of writing fiction.

Where my themes come
from

Culture clash. Much of my fiction
explores conflicts between cultures. You might think this theme a legacy of my
training as an anthropologist or of many years of reading history. Perhaps a
stronger source lies in my background as someone neither fully of one culture
nor of another.

My mother came from a Pennsylvania Dutch background and was the first in
her family to complete high school; my father's mother belonged to the Daughters
of the American Revolution and had a college degree, as did her mother, and her
mother before her. My hometown of Beavercreek, Ohio, lies smack on the invisible
line where Northern culture and Southern culture collide and not far from the
edge of the Appalachian cultural area. I've lived in the North, South, East,
and West, in small towns and big cities, and belonged nowhere except New
Orleans and Asheville, North Carolina (where anyone can fit in).

Finding ways to bridge cultural gaps is essential in today's world. Because
of people who think their beliefs and customs are the only correct ones, our
civilization teeters on the brink of disintegration or even outright
destruction. I hope my fiction encourage readers to take a stand in favor of
understanding and tolerance. In Benjamin Franklin's famous words (as cited in
Bartlett's), "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang
separately."

Loss and recovering
from loss. It’s probably not surprising that my fiction often deals with loss. As
mentioned above, my mother’s death spurred me to pursue fiction writing
seriously. Our house was badly damaged in the flood caused by the failure of
the federal levees in New Orleans in 2005, and I have since written many
stories about New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, natural disaster, and rebuilding
one’s life. But even before these events, the theme of my life was loss and
recovery.

I was born with several minor birth defects. My father was a
commission-only salesman then, and my family sacrificed to cover my medical
expenses.

In college, I started developing the first of many serious chronic
illnesses. By the time I finished writing my Ph.D. dissertation, I was debilitated,
unable to think clearly, and in severe pain. Lab tests were not as sensitive
then; they showed nothing. (Only years later did I get diagnoses of
fibromyalgia and systemic lupus erythematosus.)

My doctor told me, “Don’t do anything that hurts.” Worst. Advice. Ever. After
an excruciatingly boring month of doing nothing (because everything hurt), I rejected his suggestion and looked for ways to
do the things I enjoyed. For example, a pillow on my lap provided enough
support that I could hold a book and read again. Encouraged by that simple
solution, I kept experimenting until I could do many things again.

Even so, I mourned the loss of the life I had had before and the loss of
the future I had expected. I grieved for two years, until I was thoroughly sick
of grief. Better half a life than no life, I decided, and began weighing the
pain and exhaustion of each activity against the enjoyment I would get out of
it. Gradually I rebuilt my life into something worthwhile again.

Then I developed another health problem. Again I mourned. Again I decided
to take my life back. Again I found a way to create a new life that was
interesting and productive life. How many times did I repeat this cycle? I
don’t know; when I got older, it became routine for new health problems to
develop before I had finished adjusting to the previous ones.

I don’t consciously choose loss as a theme. It infiltrates my fiction
because it so deeply influences my world view and my daily life. I do choose,
however, to show in my fiction what loss has taught me: Every problem has a
solution. One can rebuild one’s life as many times as it takes. One can’t know
the future so there’s no point worrying about it. Life is hard and dark and
absurd, and good things rarely happen on their own; one has to make one’s own
happiness and success. One should always be on the lookout for moments and things
of beauty, of strangeness, of awe, and of humor.

Duty. I’m not sure why I
write about duty so often. It may be because I strongly believe that each of us
should strive to leave the world a better place for our having been here. It
may be because I feel guilty about not carrying my full weight as a citizen of
the world: I do mentor and critique other writers as much as I can; however, most
of my nonwriting time spent caring for my medical problems at the expense of
helping others.

The “other.” My father was born a
missionary’s son in The Philippines. My uncle worked in Japan for many years.
Religious persecution drove my mother’s Dunker relatives and my father’s
father’s Quaker ancestors out of Europe and Great Britain to America. No wonder
I grew up fascinated with other cultures and time periods.

My birth defects made me stand out in elementary school, and no one but my
aunt understood my intense love of reading. As a result, I got a personal,
in-depth education in “otherness” from both sides of the “us” and “them” divide
early on.

My interest has only grown as an adult, increasing with each new place I
travel to, each new language I study, and each new book I read. Occasionally I
write a contemporary story set in generic America, but I prefer to set my
stories in interesting cultures, other time periods, and other worlds.